i fucking hate going to the phone store.
i feel like the phone store is a perfect distillation of our awful boring capitalist dystopia.
getting a new phone used to be exciting. you used to go in, pick out some fucked up little guy with a weird flippy keyboard or two screens or some strange new function. now it's shelves of identical glass rectangles playing ads on loop. theoretically, i could pick any one of these identical glass rectangles, but i've had an iphone for over a decade now so i'm just going to go in and choose the new iphone. my old iphone still works fine even though the back glass is cracked but here i am, kneeling at the shrine of planned obsolescence, getting a new glass rectangle. oh! but this one has a square edge instead of a rounded one! if you're lucky, maybe you get to pick a color.
get a $50 plastic case to protect your $1000 glass rectangle. pay 50 more dollars to get another thin piece of glass to put on top of the glass rectangle so you don't scratch it. the chargers don't even come in the box anymore!
the whole process just feels like throwing money in a hole. it’s absolutely maddening.